


Sharp

by AceQueenKing



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Medea - Euripides
Genre: Bargaining, Child Murder, Difficult Decisions, F/M, Family Dynamics, Gods, Gods Dealing with Demi-Gods, Gods Dealing with Mortals, Murder, Revenge, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 10:33:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18809410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/pseuds/AceQueenKing
Summary: A sword does not need a fine lineage, her father told her once. It only needs to be sharp.There is no sharper blade than Medea.





	Sharp

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avaloncat555](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avaloncat555/gifts).



When she makes the cut, she make it clean.

Medea is strong and she is cruel but she is never— _never_ —without mercy. She repeats that over and over in her head as picks up and holds the sword, touches its curved blade:  _It’s important to make the cut clean. No suffering._

This is what is going through her head when she runs the sharp edge of the blade over the first child’s throat:  _a sharp weapon is a good weapon_ _._  Her father once told her this, during his lessons on how to arm, how to cut. Father always pointed out the Olympians hadn’t been more powerful, they’d been better armed. Once, she thought she would be at his side when the inevitable rebellion occurred. Now, she knows better.

She will never see her father again.

Still, she hears his voice in her heart as she chases after the children, eyes not crazed but coldly practical.  _It’s important to make the cut clean. No hesitation. Hesitation only brings suffering._  She misses her father, she realizes with a bitter pang; glorious Aeëtes will not see her again, and she will never hear the glory of his voice in anything but her own mind. She thinks of him as she wields the sword, imagines her cuts to be that of her father's hand, slicing through the waves in the oceans outside Aea. Her father shone in the slick-wet shine of grandfather ocean, in the gaze of grandfather sun; she thinks of him, his booming voice, his shining skin, and the thought gives her strength as she wields her sword, allows her to ignore the shrieks of her scared children.

She bellows, full of regrets and terrors all her own. She is a woman without a country, without a father, without a husband. What is left to her but terror and regret?

Her children do not suffer — much. A quick sword is a finer instrument than any lyre. Medea has heard the best of the lyre, back on the Argo; Orpheus could not make his instrument sing with even half the glory of Medea’s blood-slick sword. This is done not with anger, though she is wrathful. Her cuts are made with calm, deliberate speed.  Medea does nothing by half-measures.

Will she miss them? Of course. These are her children, born of her womb. These are her children, who share the divine glimmer in her blood, even if it is marred by their half-mortal nature. These are her children, and she sends them down to the house of Hades with nothing less than careful, deliberate mercy.

That is what she tells herself that this is: Mercy,  _mercy_. Not like the girl. Jason’s little whore? She wanted her to  _suffer_. A haughty Greek princess, she took no sorrow in sending her to the boatman. Still, it is not, entirely, Medea’s fault that the girl has expedited her journey to the underworld. The princess put on the robes and crown of a sun-god. What was left to such a cocky idiot but to burn? The Gods are not kind to their lessers who dare to think they could climb the celestial mountain. A lesson the princess has learned.

And soon, her beloved Jason will learn it, too.

But her children, his children? They are innocent. Their fates are merely a mercy killing; collateral damage. They are sacrificial lambs. Her aim has been true, she notes in the quiet (and it is so quiet now,  _quiet quiet quiet_  as she has never been and never will be again). Her eldest is dead before he hit the ground. The younger suffers from the memory of seeing his brother fall for a few precious seconds— as all younger siblings, in the end, suffer— but he has fallen as well. One quick cut. The deed is done, their blood pools.

Medea drags their bodies over to the hole that lies in the center of their year. Once, Jason built it in hopes of building them a pond here in their new, Grecian home, were Medea could teach the boys to swim, as her father had taught her, once. That, of course, was before he decided a Greek princess was better to hold as a wife than a Colchian one. To him, Medea may as well be a barbarian, scratching at her matted furs. Never mind that she was raised in a home with  _far_  more gold than anything in this savage land. Now, the watering hole will simply be a pit, though her children must still pass through it.

She drags their bodies to it, points the blood that wets her hand down to the world below. She is grateful she has dressed her little sheep in black for this before the wound was cut; she debated putting them in the funerary colors  _after_ , but this way hides the color of their wounds until her hand comes away wet from their precious skin. She presses a kiss to each head as she lowers them into the ground, tilts their necks down so the blood and spirits will flow to the world below. They are still warm. She strikes the ground several times — once, twice, thrice. “Thou lord of the realm of gloom, and thou, his queen, won by violence but with better faith than my own husband offered, with ill-omened speech I make my prayer to you. Be present and take these children into your house.”

Her father would be furious to see her pray to Olympians, but her father is not here. And Medea, well, she is not in a position where she can afford to be picky about what deities she favors. She knows Jason is beloved of Hera, and like all Olympians, that queen will be eager to find any reason to justify turning the Furies upon an ungrateful woman. So she feigns obedience and commits to the death-rights, offers libations of milk and honey from her stores, and the blood, of course, of the lambs below. She does not wrap them — that is for the final burial, but she does not wish their ghosts to be around for that. They have suffered enough. Sending their shades down immediately is its own form of mercy.

And Medea is nothing but merciful, even at her worst. Later, she is sure, they will tell the story the other way: no mercy, no regrets. A murderess is easier to imagine if one imagine sheer ego, sheer wrath. Easier to see her as a monster, not a desperate woman sobbing over pieces of her brother, a desperate woman being left to starve in a foreign land while the man she once loved her tells her she should be glad to lose her sons to a royal piglet. She snarls.  She is too full of both mercy and regret and they both spill into the jars of libations she tips below. Her tears mix with the milk, with the honey. No god pops up from the underground to tell her the sacrifice is improper and she takes it as a sign they are accepted.

The children are to their new home, then.

When she is done with that, she dusts her bloody hands and then goes to her last bucket of river-water; she washes them clean, for the other deity she must pray to is of the opposite element and she will not mix sacrifices. She spreads her clean hands out on her last memento of her father; a mirror that glints with firelight, the last proof of her divine heritage. It had been a gift from her father’s father to her father, meant to be passed down through their half-mortal children until such as a time as they needed the divine intervention of their ancestors. Medea is a bit sorry to use it, but she has no half-human heirs to take it. She is the end of her line, now. 

She holds it up until she can gather the sun in it, centers it on the burning flame and stares into the reflected image even as her eyes water. “Come,” she whispers. “Father of light, father of titans, I call you. Come. Your blood calls forth in their hour of need. Come.”

She had thought it would take longer than it does; she barely has the final invocation out before she feels a warm (hot, really, boiling hot, uncomfortable) hand touch her shoulder.

“I had thought when I was finally invoked, it would be after  _more_  than a mere three generations,” Helios says. Does he know what she has done? He must, for the sun like the soil misses nothing. “Not by the first half-breed.”

“I am your son’s daughter,” She says, kneeling prostrate before his throne. “I am not entirely mortal.” 

“You will die,” grandfather says. “As all mortal things die.” His tone is bored, disinterested, as if his great-grandchildren do not lay dead not ten feet from him. “Could you even look at me without flying into flames?”

“Is that an invitation, my lord?” She does not dare to call him by a familiar title just yet; she has no desire to burst into flame because she has displeased her forefather.

“If you take it as such,” he says, and she hears the admiration in his honeyed voice. “If you can stand it.”

She turns and stands; she is smaller than him, but not by much. She stares into his glory, and sees Aeëtes' eyes, Aeëtes glorious skin. Sees her own mouth, and isn’t that funny, how they can share some traits, three generations divided. She glares into his eyes and holds open her arms; the mirror topples from her grasp and breaks, but no matter.

“I gaze upon you, my lord and I do not burn, as mortal flesh would.” She keeps her eyes upon him, no matter how much it hurts. Medea has endured worse pain, will endure worse still.  

“And yet your eyes water.” Helios walks toward her, and she keeps her eyes open, even as the jelly of her eyeballs threatens to melt. His hand cups her chin in what feels more like a bored and clinical examination than any sort of tender comfort. “That is the problem with the way we reproduce. Every generation is a poorer copy of what has come before. You need only look up to the heavens to see  _that._ ”

That’s naked blasphemy to Zeus and his Olympian cohort, but the look on grandfather’s face suggests he will bear the stain of it. She, wisely, for Medea is always wise, does not comment upon it.

“Then fortuitously for you, there will be no more generations from my bloodline.” She flicks her eyes over to the pit; he does not bother to do more than scoff.

“Their deaths mean nothing to  _me_  or  _my kind_ ,” he says. “You mate with dirt, you spawn dirt. That is all. You should not have run from your father; Aeëtes would have given you a mate of more distinguished breeding.”

“I am aware I have made mistakes,” she says, cross. “I did not call you here for a lecture, even if you are my grandfather. I came for the boon I am owed.”

“You are spending every gift the gods have given you in such a squander.” Helios balks visibly, waving his hands. “They will not think you a god for what you've done, you know, regardless of your blood. Any coward can murder a child.”

“It is not a murder that is my purpose,” Medea says, taking a deep breath to keep herself calm. “I seek justice, justice for myself and justice for them and justice for the gods.”

“Justice for the Gods?” His mouth opens into a smile and his teeth gleam like her father’s in the light. “Oh do tell, little godling.”

“I am of a God's blood, even if my powers cannot be compared to yours. I am the daughter of the son of the sun.” A weak claim, but a valid one none the less. “Yet Jason throws me aside, orders me banished in favor of a fully  _mortal_  bride! I sacrificed for him with a god's love yet he spurns me. And his bride spat upon the Gods' rights as well. She dared to wear a God’s veil and paid the price for it.”

Knowing it is a risk and yet knowing there is little choice but to try, she jabs her finger toward her grandfather and guesses her father’s dream may well have originated in his sire. “Perhaps for the Olympians,  _they_  may be content to turn a blind eye to such injustice, but as you said, they are weaker things. You and I are part of an older pantheon and our justice is an older thing with it, brutal and swift. However weak my claim, you know as well as I: the price of a mortal’s blasphemy is death. As it will be for the rebels above, one day.”

“Hm.” He nods and it is a ponderous thing, slow as a volcano’s rising puff of smoke. “You make a valid argument, granddaughter. Is it rescue you wish? I will take you to the land beyond the skies. We will give you vapor and cloud to synthesize into new poisons. We will hide you from your father's eyes. We will use your cunning when the revolution comes to Olympus.”

“It is a rescue I wish, but I will make it in my own way. Only a fool relies on someone else’s aid.” She holds out her hands and smiles in the most charming way she can. “I require only the use of your chariot. Your presence is not necessary and, truthfully, should be avoided, lest the Olympians think this an attempt on their chosen. Let the blame lie on me for provoking Hera, grandfather. I am half-mortal and I can bear it.”

“You are a clever child and your logic is sound. So be it.” Helios waves his hand and his golden chariot appears, shining. “We will watch you with great interest, granddaughter."

He leaves without any other goodbye, but Medea finds she prefers it that way. There is only one goodbye she has the energy for, anymore.

With trembling hands, she bundles her children into her grandfather’s chariot.

***

When they find Jason, he is curled on the door of a house he has not lived in for weeks.

The townspeople do not know what is wrong. The townspeople see only the prince who will be king, sobbing upon his ex-wife’s door. The townspeople put their hands on him, see blood in the doorway and do not inquire further.

“She’s not a woman!” He sobs. “She’s a monster, a monster!”

The townspeople bundle the princeling in blankets and tip wine cut with water in his mouth. There are glances between them, whispers. They know from Jason’s stories (for like all heroes, Jason has an innate gift for storytelling) that he is a beloved of Hera.

But they know, too, what a chariot with golden gleaming wheels and serpents means. They know what god pulls it.

And so as always when Gods are at war, the people keep their heads low and try not to invite further calamity from any diety. Sacrifices are made to all the Olympians, and a few Gods that aren’t. Helios has a shrine build in what was once Medea’s front yard; a shrine to Hera claims the back. Nothing claims the empty hole where Jason once claimed his children would learn to swim and no grass grows in the area where blood seeped into stone. The house is cleaned, but no one moves in. The servants whisper of secrets and ghosts and gradually leave to seek new masters once it is clear the lady will never return.

“Why?” Jason, at long last a king, keens. “Why? I loved her so. How could she hate me?”

No one answers him to his face, but plenty of theories propagate behind his back. No one blames him, but, collectively, they all examine signs, wondering how to avoid provoking the gods who visited him with such an evil.

***

She takes the children to Hera's temple on the hill. Hera sees her coming – how can she not? In grandfather’s chariot, she is as radiant as the dawn itself. Hera folds her arms and looks at her with a weary expression.

“Oh, child.” She sighs. “Must your kind always be so loud in your actions? That’s the problem for you titan descendants. You all mewl like kittens all day long.”

“Like lion cubs, surely. You cannot deny we do a lot of damage.” She steps off her chariot and Hera winces, seeing the babes behind it. She flies to Medea's side, strokes their soft hair that will grow no longer. 

“Oh. Oh, your claws are sharp.” She glares at Medea, fury in her eyes. “Why?”

“Mercy.” She shrugs. “They were born princes to two thrones. But Aeëtes will not recognize them, not now. And now that their own father has thrown me over for another...Their father would have made them a way of punishing me in proxy eventually. I would have been too far away to protect them. I am a lioness, as you claim; what mother lion would not protect their cubs?”

“And that protection is death?” Hera places her hand on one of their soft foreheads and strokes it tenderly. “Oh, mother. How fierce you are.”

“They died as peaceful a death as I could give them. I have done worse for lesser men. Immortal Hera, you saw what Theseus had done to my auntie’s godling. Once Jason has acquired a fully mortal son, how do you think he'd see the sons from an unwanted marriage who burned twice as bright? To send them to your gloomy brother’s abode is a mercy compared to how their father and their brothers would treat them. A step-mother rarely has a need for cuckoo eggs, and you cannot deny this is true.”

Hera, more than anyone else, surely has seen more than her fair share of bastard godlings, Medea thinks. She watches the woman's expression change; the brow lowers, the eyes glisten. The argument is persuasive. 

“No, I cannot.” Hera sighs, flickering her eyes up toward the heavens. “But I also cannot excuse the casual spill of babes' blood. You are their mother. How could you…?”

“You are not a Fury and pursuit of me is not your duty, queen of heaven.” Medea strokes her elder son’s brow; he would have been a fine king, had things been different. “But it is not so different than killing one’s father, is it not? And I am to believe you and your siblings have done quite well at that.”

“You tread on dangerous ground, sun-daughter,” Hera hisses; Medea does not look up, preoccupied still on stroking the child’s sweet cheek. It is cold now, growing colder. A sadness trembles at her heart but she ignores it, must ignore it.

“Leave it to your counterparts below to judge me. All I ask is that you allow your chosen’s children to lay buried in your grounds.”

“And why would I allow that?” Hera scoffs, narrows her eyes, peers at Medea as if she can see straight through her. “I owe you nothing.”

“Do you not now?” Medea turns to her, pulls down the sleeve of her robe, shows her the arrow-wound left oh so long ago by Eros’ mighty instrument. She will not bring up the point out loud; Hera’s wide eyes are sufficient. “Please, Hera. If ever there has been a goddess who can understand the pain of a woman scorned and thrown aside for another… “

She reaches out with one hand, grasps the Olympian’s shoulder, and sees, for the first time, a spark of pity mixed in with the fear in her eyes. “I do this for Jason, you know. Let our favorite come to visit his children here, let him know  _peace_  in your grand temple. I will leave this place and cause trouble for you no more after.”

“Fine.” Hera closes her eyes and sighs. “You may bury them here, by that tree. But I will not assist. I wash my hands of it.”

“Thank you, benevolent queen.” Medea curtseys and is careful to make it look proper. “Only one last thing I will ask of you.”

“Hm?”

“Watch over him, your Jason.” Her face softens, though she hates that it does. “Where I am going, he will not follow. Please make sure he knows where the boys are buried, know where he can find peace after he has learned  _regret_.”

“I will,” Hera says with a mad bark of a laugh. There is a spark of light, and she is gone.

Medea carefully pulls a shovel from her back and is careful not to jostle her precious cargo as she begins to dig her children’s final resting place. She does not allow herself to think of them as she moves her instrument through the dirt, for she knows if she thinks of them, her heart will tremble. Not from the doing of the deed but of the deed done, of the children she has spared from this world and from her heart. 

If tears dot her eyes as she chips away at the dirt, Hera’s groundskeepers are good not to mention it.

She forces herself to think of her plans after this, of where she will go. It is on to Thebes, onto new, strange land. She tries to force herself to think of beginnings as she washes the boys in water from Hera's sacred lake, anoints them in lotus oil from Hera's store, binds them in cloth and places the coin under the tongues for the trip down that final river. 

She can only hope King Aegeus proves more suitable than Jason. If not, it will be up to herself to rescue herself again. 

She places her children into the grave, covers them in the dirt. No tears, now. Medea presses her goodbyes into the dirt, and heads out, shoulders back, head held high, as she greets the dawn of a new era. If her thoughts go back to the children — and they do, and they will, and will always — she still does not turn around, letting the sunlight warm her back as she walks on. 


End file.
